It looks like the once seemingly quixotic campaign for fast food workers to get something close to $15 per hour will continue to pick up steam, and maybe even be successful. Since this is America, and this story is about allowing more people to live better lives, there is a whole lot of opposition to it of course.
Opponents of the "Fight for $15" movement claim that such jobs are meant to be temporary shelters for people who are trying to find their way into more respectable, gainful employment. Such conservative opponents argue that fast food jobs should not be legitimized as a decent, permanent occupation by paying living wages--they think these workers should suffer and scrape by so that they will be properly motivated to win access to better jobs.
What these conservative opponents fail to realize is that those "better jobs" don't exist anymore, and they haven't for some time now. As it becomes increasingly impossible to secure any employment at all, regardless of training and educational background, fast food jobs represent a life raft to millions who would otherwise be penniless.
Opponents of this campaign are stuck in the mindset of forty years ago, when anyone with half a brain and moderate ambition could make enough money to buy a house, a car, and send three kids to college, all on a single income too. In the past, you really did have to be somewhat lazy to be among the long-term unemployed. Now, you have to be highly trained, highly skilled, highly intelligent, superhumanly persistent and incredibly lucky just to scrape by.
The new reality is that working at a fast food joint is the best that the majority of graduates from even moderately good high schools can hope for. Even colleges too. The average age of a fast food worker today is 25. It's no longer a summer job for students or for ex-cons or recovering drug addicts trying to reintegrate into society. There's no stable society capable of absorbing these people. The support system has become the system.
What was once considered a safety net for marginal characters is now an irreplaceable resource for millions of people with families trying to be decent citizens. They have little to no hope of clawing out anything better.
Of course, giving fast food workers a decent hourly wage is a temporary Band-Aid on the festering, mortal wound of automated corporate capitalism. Machines are already nearing the market that can obviate fast food workers entirely.
Making fast food jobs into decent middle class jobs is no way to build a sustainable middle class of people with sufficient purchasing power to drive a robust market economy for generations. It is rather a way to incentivize capitalists to double down on automation as rapidly as possible, to remove labor from the equation entirely.
The solution is so obvious and sensible that it will of course meet with immense challenges before being accepted. Every citizen must be guaranteed a minimum, basic level of annual income by the government. This solution requires fostering a genuine, vivid appreciation for the human spirit and mind, reconfiguring our attitude towards fellow citizens from one of constant annoyance to something approaching fraternity and empathy. It requires finding value in human beings beyond their work output. It means divorcing the concept of an income from the concept of working. It means rediscovering what humans are really worth, beyond their productive capacity.
Wednesday, May 27, 2015
Thursday, May 21, 2015
So Long, David Letterman and the Middle Class
This week was David Letterman's last on TV, after being on it nonstop since about 1982. It's also the first week I ever paid any real attention to him. In 1996, when I was ten, I saw Independence Day, and President Bill Pullman's daughter tattles on her dad to her mom, saying "Daddy let me watch Letterman." I didn't know who Letterman was, but if he was name-checked in Independence Day, which at that time for me was the coolest movie that could every possibly exist, he must be important.
I think I tried to stay up and watch some of this mysterious Letterman person shortly after, but either couldn't stay awake late enough, or found him to just be an average adult man, who looked like a teacher, in a suit saying things I didn't care about.
In high school and college, I religiously watched Conan O'Brien, who, I would later realize, did exactly what Letterman did with that same show--innovated and pushed the envelope as hard as he could. Conan carried the legacy of what Letterman did with the Late Night franchise as well as it could be carried. But this was the late nineties/early oughties, when envelopes had been pushed for a while. Letterman was Conan starting in 1982, doing things on TV that no one had ever seen before.
Awash in nostalgia as we all have been recently, I went back and watched some clips of Late Night era Letterman. I was only dimly aware until recently that he started the show currently helmed by Seth Myers until 1993, when he got his current show, Late Show on CBS. The only Letterman I've ever known has been a tired, slightly bored, stiff, cranky old man who seemed way more beloved than his show-to-show performance seemed to merit. But watching YouTube clips of his NBC show from the late 80s was revelatory.
The first thing that leapt out was how fast his mind worked, and how his guests seemed genuinely excited to try to keep up with him. He exuded energy in a way that seems light years away from the guy I've seen for the past ten or even fifteen years. Generally I don't like energetic comedic personas, from Dane Cook to Kevin Hart to Jimmy Fallon. But where Dane Cook's energy is (was?) fratty, and Jimmy Fallon's is saccharinely ingratiating and designedly viral, Letterman's seemed to come from a genuine overabundance of comic mania, of critical intelligence. He had a lot to say and a lot of entertaining ideas to communicate, and wanted to make sure it all got out there.
Watching the montage that ended the series as the Foo Fighters played "Everlong" brought out just how different his show was from the current crop. It truly is from a different era. There are so many tactile experiences in the highlights, so many things happening, so many spectacles, events, real, tangible things taking place out in the world. If Jimmy Fallon does the Tonight Show for another thirty years, I have a hard time picturing him producing a clip package with this much real, out in the world stuff happening. People are much more detached and isolated now. It was striking to see how engaged and part of the world Letterman and his show were through these images.
In my sampling of 80s/early 90s era Letterman clips, I also noticed how many regular people he had on. One episode he had on the entire population of a tiny town in Iowa that had recently been removed from the map because they were too small. He had two very old ladies on to talk about their town, giving them plenty of air time and not rushing them at all. He would have bag boys on and other people from regular jobs, and not exactly mock them but share them as being part of the fun world he created.
I see no real tactile engagement with the world from the current crop of late night hosts, and certainly no dialogue with the middle class. In a way it's appropriate that Letterman is retiring now, since the middle class doesn't exist anymore either. His audience is gone, and now so is he.
I think I tried to stay up and watch some of this mysterious Letterman person shortly after, but either couldn't stay awake late enough, or found him to just be an average adult man, who looked like a teacher, in a suit saying things I didn't care about.
In high school and college, I religiously watched Conan O'Brien, who, I would later realize, did exactly what Letterman did with that same show--innovated and pushed the envelope as hard as he could. Conan carried the legacy of what Letterman did with the Late Night franchise as well as it could be carried. But this was the late nineties/early oughties, when envelopes had been pushed for a while. Letterman was Conan starting in 1982, doing things on TV that no one had ever seen before.
Awash in nostalgia as we all have been recently, I went back and watched some clips of Late Night era Letterman. I was only dimly aware until recently that he started the show currently helmed by Seth Myers until 1993, when he got his current show, Late Show on CBS. The only Letterman I've ever known has been a tired, slightly bored, stiff, cranky old man who seemed way more beloved than his show-to-show performance seemed to merit. But watching YouTube clips of his NBC show from the late 80s was revelatory.
The first thing that leapt out was how fast his mind worked, and how his guests seemed genuinely excited to try to keep up with him. He exuded energy in a way that seems light years away from the guy I've seen for the past ten or even fifteen years. Generally I don't like energetic comedic personas, from Dane Cook to Kevin Hart to Jimmy Fallon. But where Dane Cook's energy is (was?) fratty, and Jimmy Fallon's is saccharinely ingratiating and designedly viral, Letterman's seemed to come from a genuine overabundance of comic mania, of critical intelligence. He had a lot to say and a lot of entertaining ideas to communicate, and wanted to make sure it all got out there.
Watching the montage that ended the series as the Foo Fighters played "Everlong" brought out just how different his show was from the current crop. It truly is from a different era. There are so many tactile experiences in the highlights, so many things happening, so many spectacles, events, real, tangible things taking place out in the world. If Jimmy Fallon does the Tonight Show for another thirty years, I have a hard time picturing him producing a clip package with this much real, out in the world stuff happening. People are much more detached and isolated now. It was striking to see how engaged and part of the world Letterman and his show were through these images.
In my sampling of 80s/early 90s era Letterman clips, I also noticed how many regular people he had on. One episode he had on the entire population of a tiny town in Iowa that had recently been removed from the map because they were too small. He had two very old ladies on to talk about their town, giving them plenty of air time and not rushing them at all. He would have bag boys on and other people from regular jobs, and not exactly mock them but share them as being part of the fun world he created.
I see no real tactile engagement with the world from the current crop of late night hosts, and certainly no dialogue with the middle class. In a way it's appropriate that Letterman is retiring now, since the middle class doesn't exist anymore either. His audience is gone, and now so is he.
Tuesday, May 19, 2015
Post-Employment Reality Tentatively Acknowledged by Mainstream Press
In this week's Sunday New York Times, the economic realities that have been glaringly obvious for years and years were, albeit in the most halting and qualified of general academic fashions, acknowledged. The piece, Signs of a Shakier New Normal, didn't appear in the influential Sunday Review section, where something like this belongs, but in the Sunday Business section. Still, this is a highly unusual breach in the armor of neoliberal propaganda, and worth exploring.
In true mainstream conciliatory fashion, as it is written by a full professor at a good university, and so a person who both has things to lose (rare these days), and hasn't been personally effected by the permanent post-employment economy that has been staring us in the face for a while now, the baseline thesis is that of course the economy will "reset" to normal, pre-Recession levels. Of course there is an underlying normality, which will allow the vanishing middle class to return, and people under 35 will be able to start families, buy cars and homes in great numbers or at the very least not have to live with their parents any more. Of course this will happen--it's so obvious, because it always has in the past.
But what differentiates this piece from the usual Panglossian neoliberal economic tripe, is that there is the very merest of allowances that maybe, just maybe, our post-employment economy is permanent. The closing sentence of the piece: "No one knows whether or how much of a reset may be underway. Yet I can't help but wonder which features of current data might prove to be harbingers of larger, more permanent changes to come." This is classic neoliberal economist thinking--you need to know fully and for sure before making a claim. All thinking must at every possible point be supported by as much data as is conceivably possible. Thought may not begin until data is as close to 100% complete and accurate as possible, until peak, optimal sufficiency is reached. But since data is never sufficient, and can always be bolstered and refined, thinking never starts. And so we end up being led by "experts" who think that our obviously permanent post-employment economy is almost certainly just a passing phase before the salvific Grand Reset.
For these economists, trends are merely passively commented on, data is fetishized, and distance is kept. But the "data" in these economic musings represent years of life for an entire generation in which their confidence is sapped, their experiences constricted, their outlooks permanently and irrecoverably dampened. The "larger, more permanent changes to come" Cowen's allows himself to mention at the very end of this scandalously realistic article are where the piece should begin, since they are already here. What the passage of time will do is allow them to become undeniable. Then once there has been a solid decade in which these larger, more permanent changes can be studied as fully formed data points, Cowen and his ilk will tell us how it all came to pass.
Judging by his picture, the author, Tyler Cowen, seems to be in his early fifties, and came of age in a time when young people could find entry level, $35,000/year jobs without feeling like they won the lottery. In his day, you probably didn't have to be a "rock star" to make 35k. Now you do. Ten years from now, you'll have to be a rock star to make $11/hr.
Though Cowen's piece is rare in that it dares to even begin acknowledging the bald-faced realities that have been a part of daily life for millions of people in their twenties for years and years and years, it is still drenched with the requisite neoliberal self-deception that is the price of admission into mainstream thought. Consider these lines: "One consequence is that young people are living at home longer and receiving more aid from their parents. They also seem to be less interested in buying their own homes." It's rare that neoliberal capitalist self-deception is so baldly stated--of course millions of people in their twenties aren't interested in buying homes. It's not that they desperately want to but regard that as a pipe dream, even if they have degrees in good fields from good schools. It's that they think having a home is totally lame!
There's a similar, equally grotesque, bit of such ideological contortion in this piece by the grating Kyle Chaka, who valorizes the perilous, schizophrenic post-employment vista as an invigorating, freedom-increasing entrepreneurial wonderland. The lengths that intelligent people will go to to defend the rationality of an obviously broken system are astounding.
In true mainstream conciliatory fashion, as it is written by a full professor at a good university, and so a person who both has things to lose (rare these days), and hasn't been personally effected by the permanent post-employment economy that has been staring us in the face for a while now, the baseline thesis is that of course the economy will "reset" to normal, pre-Recession levels. Of course there is an underlying normality, which will allow the vanishing middle class to return, and people under 35 will be able to start families, buy cars and homes in great numbers or at the very least not have to live with their parents any more. Of course this will happen--it's so obvious, because it always has in the past.
But what differentiates this piece from the usual Panglossian neoliberal economic tripe, is that there is the very merest of allowances that maybe, just maybe, our post-employment economy is permanent. The closing sentence of the piece: "No one knows whether or how much of a reset may be underway. Yet I can't help but wonder which features of current data might prove to be harbingers of larger, more permanent changes to come." This is classic neoliberal economist thinking--you need to know fully and for sure before making a claim. All thinking must at every possible point be supported by as much data as is conceivably possible. Thought may not begin until data is as close to 100% complete and accurate as possible, until peak, optimal sufficiency is reached. But since data is never sufficient, and can always be bolstered and refined, thinking never starts. And so we end up being led by "experts" who think that our obviously permanent post-employment economy is almost certainly just a passing phase before the salvific Grand Reset.
For these economists, trends are merely passively commented on, data is fetishized, and distance is kept. But the "data" in these economic musings represent years of life for an entire generation in which their confidence is sapped, their experiences constricted, their outlooks permanently and irrecoverably dampened. The "larger, more permanent changes to come" Cowen's allows himself to mention at the very end of this scandalously realistic article are where the piece should begin, since they are already here. What the passage of time will do is allow them to become undeniable. Then once there has been a solid decade in which these larger, more permanent changes can be studied as fully formed data points, Cowen and his ilk will tell us how it all came to pass.
Judging by his picture, the author, Tyler Cowen, seems to be in his early fifties, and came of age in a time when young people could find entry level, $35,000/year jobs without feeling like they won the lottery. In his day, you probably didn't have to be a "rock star" to make 35k. Now you do. Ten years from now, you'll have to be a rock star to make $11/hr.
Though Cowen's piece is rare in that it dares to even begin acknowledging the bald-faced realities that have been a part of daily life for millions of people in their twenties for years and years and years, it is still drenched with the requisite neoliberal self-deception that is the price of admission into mainstream thought. Consider these lines: "One consequence is that young people are living at home longer and receiving more aid from their parents. They also seem to be less interested in buying their own homes." It's rare that neoliberal capitalist self-deception is so baldly stated--of course millions of people in their twenties aren't interested in buying homes. It's not that they desperately want to but regard that as a pipe dream, even if they have degrees in good fields from good schools. It's that they think having a home is totally lame!
There's a similar, equally grotesque, bit of such ideological contortion in this piece by the grating Kyle Chaka, who valorizes the perilous, schizophrenic post-employment vista as an invigorating, freedom-increasing entrepreneurial wonderland. The lengths that intelligent people will go to to defend the rationality of an obviously broken system are astounding.
Thursday, May 14, 2015
My Other Vehicle is Going to Pluto
This feels like something of a new golden age for NASA, and for space enthusiasm in general. In two months and one day exactly, the New Horizons spacecraft at 32,600 mph the fastest ever built, will reach Pluto. Even at that incredible speed, it will end up taking a full nine years to reach Pluto. Right now it's about 50 million miles away, roughly half the distance between Earth and the Sun. But perhaps even more intriguingly, in three years, the James Webb Space Telescope, many times more powerful than Hubble, will go into orbit, offering up images of what light looked like only 300,000 years after the Big Bang. To tide us over, we'll have to make due with knowing more about Pluto than ever before.
Since its discovery by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930, Pluto has been an object of keen interest, as it was the only planet added to the previous eight discovered in the twentieth century. Pluto represented the limitless horizons of discovery in our own time, the grand possibility of major new findings in our own celestial backyard. But we've made precious little progress in learning about it since it first appeared to human eyes.
The conditions of its discovery, and its tiny size and extreme distance from the Sun, also make it one of the quirkiest planets. Its tragic demotion at the callous hands of Mike Brown, self-proclaimed Pluto killer, only made it more endearing.
Tombaugh was an unlikely planetary discoverer--he didn't attend college, and lived on his family's farm in Kansas. Working almost entirely by his own will and ingenuity, he built an extremely powerful telescope, and discovered Pluto. Pluto got its name from an unusually bright eleven year old schoolgirl named Venetia Burney.
But Tombaugh didn't just discover Pluto--he discovered the first Kuiper Belt Object, a chaotic region at the outermost limits of our solar system which we now know is home to hundreds of dwarf planets and moons. Pluto is actually the second largest object in the region, next to the dwarf planet Eris, but it is number one in fascination and folkloric value.
Since its discovery 85 years ago, humanity has only seen the blurriest images of Pluto--this image, hard-won though it was, is the best we've gotten, and it isn't great. With the cameras on the New Horizons, scientists will be able to see structures about the size of a small city block.
The New Horizons mission, launched in 2006, traveling 36,000 miles per hour, has traveled 2, 550,000,000 miles, and is currently only 50 million miles away from Pluto. And since this is beloved Pluto we're talking about, the spacecraft carries more homages to Pluto's discovery than any other spacecraft. NASA engineers actually figured out a way to install a portion of Tombaugh's cremated remains onboard. Tombaugh saw further than anyone in life, and now has actually, albeit in substantially altered form, traveled further than anyone.
Perhaps the best example of New Horizons embodying the spirit of Pluto's origins is in its homage to Venetia Burney. The Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter (VBSDC) is the first ever student-designed scientific instrument to be sent into deep space. Its main aim is to analyze the immense dust streaming off of the Kuiper Belt--more than six tons every second! The Voyager spacecraft passed through the Kuiper Belt decades ago, but it had 1970s technology, and could not analyze its properties properly.
The VBSDC will provide pioneering data about the chemical composition of Kuiper Belt dust, giving us insight into how the Solar System formed, and why it looks the way it does. Though the student designers of the VBSDC were highly skilled and trained, they were to some extent amateurs--just like Tombaugh.
Since its discovery by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930, Pluto has been an object of keen interest, as it was the only planet added to the previous eight discovered in the twentieth century. Pluto represented the limitless horizons of discovery in our own time, the grand possibility of major new findings in our own celestial backyard. But we've made precious little progress in learning about it since it first appeared to human eyes.
The conditions of its discovery, and its tiny size and extreme distance from the Sun, also make it one of the quirkiest planets. Its tragic demotion at the callous hands of Mike Brown, self-proclaimed Pluto killer, only made it more endearing.
Tombaugh was an unlikely planetary discoverer--he didn't attend college, and lived on his family's farm in Kansas. Working almost entirely by his own will and ingenuity, he built an extremely powerful telescope, and discovered Pluto. Pluto got its name from an unusually bright eleven year old schoolgirl named Venetia Burney.
But Tombaugh didn't just discover Pluto--he discovered the first Kuiper Belt Object, a chaotic region at the outermost limits of our solar system which we now know is home to hundreds of dwarf planets and moons. Pluto is actually the second largest object in the region, next to the dwarf planet Eris, but it is number one in fascination and folkloric value.
Since its discovery 85 years ago, humanity has only seen the blurriest images of Pluto--this image, hard-won though it was, is the best we've gotten, and it isn't great. With the cameras on the New Horizons, scientists will be able to see structures about the size of a small city block.
The New Horizons mission, launched in 2006, traveling 36,000 miles per hour, has traveled 2, 550,000,000 miles, and is currently only 50 million miles away from Pluto. And since this is beloved Pluto we're talking about, the spacecraft carries more homages to Pluto's discovery than any other spacecraft. NASA engineers actually figured out a way to install a portion of Tombaugh's cremated remains onboard. Tombaugh saw further than anyone in life, and now has actually, albeit in substantially altered form, traveled further than anyone.
Perhaps the best example of New Horizons embodying the spirit of Pluto's origins is in its homage to Venetia Burney. The Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter (VBSDC) is the first ever student-designed scientific instrument to be sent into deep space. Its main aim is to analyze the immense dust streaming off of the Kuiper Belt--more than six tons every second! The Voyager spacecraft passed through the Kuiper Belt decades ago, but it had 1970s technology, and could not analyze its properties properly.
The VBSDC will provide pioneering data about the chemical composition of Kuiper Belt dust, giving us insight into how the Solar System formed, and why it looks the way it does. Though the student designers of the VBSDC were highly skilled and trained, they were to some extent amateurs--just like Tombaugh.
Sunday, May 10, 2015
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History
This is such a fantastic podcast. World War One has always been a bit of an odd historical phenomenon--its importance is so obvious, but so removed and murky. Kind of like John Updike's status in the literary readership community--everyone respects/is aware of him, most haven't read him, though they feel they should.
Carlin does a great job of putting WW1 in its context of military history. The German forces sweeping through Belgium in the summer of 1914 had flanks that were themselves as large as the totality of Napoleon's Grand Army. Such enormous numbers of soldiers had never been organized and deployed, and Germany's meticulous plan for this mobilization is one of the most unprecedented achievements in human history.
Germany's villainy is examined, confirmed, and set in somewhat of a tragic tone--Germany was so focused on showing how great it was, it didn't realize that the rest of the world would think they were complete dicks. Its behavior in its steamroll through Belgium was so shockingly callous, evil, rape-like and overpowering, that they were instantly and lastingly branded villains. German weapons killed 27,000 French soldiers in a single short battle early in the war, a number which would have been high for an entire month of casualties in Napoleonic times.
World War One is also kind of the last mythological war, that has some kind of begrudging grandeur to it. Excellence in warfare itself used to be considered a somewhat refined, gentlemanly pursuit, like chemistry or linguistics. The idea of limited war still had some life left in it, but was pulverized in a merciless hail of flying steel. French soldiers would charge headlong against German machine guns, driven by an outdated sense of heroism that little in the new world.
The death of the 19th century, the beginning of a totally insane mechanized warscape. It was pretty easy for everyone to except the ubiquity of Predator drones in US military operations. After the appearance of the Paris Gun, whose shells were the first manmade objects to make it to the stratosphere, anything was possible. Flying pilotless missile shooting vehicles? Sure why not.
Carlin does what the best history always does--bring alive the consciousness of the past, making it understandable and compelling to our dim eyes and ears. As the best teachers do, Carlin makes it clear that he is trying to work things out for himself, to develop a fuller, clearer, more dexterous grasp of the ideas in question, and related ones that might be hit upon at any time. It isn't lecturing, its opening a window onto your own thinking.
Carlin does a great job of putting WW1 in its context of military history. The German forces sweeping through Belgium in the summer of 1914 had flanks that were themselves as large as the totality of Napoleon's Grand Army. Such enormous numbers of soldiers had never been organized and deployed, and Germany's meticulous plan for this mobilization is one of the most unprecedented achievements in human history.
Germany's villainy is examined, confirmed, and set in somewhat of a tragic tone--Germany was so focused on showing how great it was, it didn't realize that the rest of the world would think they were complete dicks. Its behavior in its steamroll through Belgium was so shockingly callous, evil, rape-like and overpowering, that they were instantly and lastingly branded villains. German weapons killed 27,000 French soldiers in a single short battle early in the war, a number which would have been high for an entire month of casualties in Napoleonic times.
World War One is also kind of the last mythological war, that has some kind of begrudging grandeur to it. Excellence in warfare itself used to be considered a somewhat refined, gentlemanly pursuit, like chemistry or linguistics. The idea of limited war still had some life left in it, but was pulverized in a merciless hail of flying steel. French soldiers would charge headlong against German machine guns, driven by an outdated sense of heroism that little in the new world.
The death of the 19th century, the beginning of a totally insane mechanized warscape. It was pretty easy for everyone to except the ubiquity of Predator drones in US military operations. After the appearance of the Paris Gun, whose shells were the first manmade objects to make it to the stratosphere, anything was possible. Flying pilotless missile shooting vehicles? Sure why not.
Carlin does what the best history always does--bring alive the consciousness of the past, making it understandable and compelling to our dim eyes and ears. As the best teachers do, Carlin makes it clear that he is trying to work things out for himself, to develop a fuller, clearer, more dexterous grasp of the ideas in question, and related ones that might be hit upon at any time. It isn't lecturing, its opening a window onto your own thinking.
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