It's been a bit since I wrote a new post for this blog. Yet as I have discovered from recent comments to my blog, people are still visiting, reading, and making comments. I want to take this opportunity to thank those who are still visiting this site and to explain my hiatus.
Monday, September 30, 2024
Stopping To Smell the Roses (And Other Roadside Allergens)
Monday, August 5, 2024
The Billboard Blitz Continues
Saturday, July 20, 2024
Voices In My Head...
Monday, July 15, 2024
The Coping Mechanisms of the Precariat: Prelude To The Great Resignation
- First, there is the erosion of the power of organized labor, an erosion which actually began with Republican President Richard Nixon's wage and price controls in the early 1970's. This erosion kicked into high gear under the Republican presidency of Ronald Reagan and has not slowed down since. The power of unions to protect their workers from low wages and excessive work demands was thus eroded.
- There is also the removal of the guarantee of lifetime employment for good and loyal employees of large corporations. This was pioneered by such CEO's as Jack Welch of General Electric and was a direct contributor to the economic precarity suffered by a majority of working Americans today.
- There were the stresses imposed by globalism as wage and labor arbitrage. This globalism was championed by right-wing, conservative executives of major corporations - the same sort of executives who are in many cases supporting the MAGA hostility to open borders championed by Donald Trump, as they see that sometimes smart people from poor countries can turn the tables on economic systems that are rigged against them.
- Consider also the removal or weakening of workplace protections against employer abuse. Many employers (as well as business customers), thus unhindered from having to be humane toward their employees, turned some of those employees into metaphorical toilet paper, doormats, and punching bags onto whom these bosses could project their unresolved and unjustified hostility.
- Lastly (at least for today's post), there is the rise of the toxic workplace - a workplace in which bosses either perpetrate or enable bullying and mobbing behavior by popular workplace staff against those who are deemed to be scapegoats.
- "Nothing is ever off-limits for those who hold power. More to the point, following the group’s rules is for the powerless. The powerful not only do not follow those rules, they flaunt their disobedience."
- "The powerful delight in the most potent expressions of power: forcing people to do things they don’t want to do; rubbing their own disobedience in the noses of the powerless. If power is not flexed, the powerful might as well not have it at all."
Sunday, June 2, 2024
Book Recommendation - Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing
Monday, May 27, 2024
The Coping Mechanisms of the Precariat, And Their Effects - Introduction
The inescapable reality is that the only thing that will reliably alter our situation is our choice to begin to organize ourselves for collective action. As Maciej Bartkowski said in his book Recovering Nonviolent History,
"The guilt of falling into . . . predatory hands . . . [lies] in the oppressed society and, thus, the solution and liberation need to come from that society transformed through its work, education, and civility. Victims and the seemingly disempowered are thus their own liberators as long as they pursue self-organization, self-attainment, and development of their communities."
Or, to quote from Alex Soojung Kim-Pang,"Collective action is the most powerful form of self-care." (Emphasis added.)
This collective action is wonderful when it succeeds. It is rather depressing when such action is sabotaged or undermined or co-opted by Uncle Toms and Aunt Tammys, or when an oppressed people refuses to do the hard work of building collective self-reliance.
"the collective actions of noncollective actors; they embody shared practices of large numbers of ordinary people whose fragmented but similar activities trigger much social change, even though these practices are rarely guided by an ideology or recognizable leaderships and organizations." - Life as Politics, p. 14.
In other words, social nonmovements consist of masses of people who don't necessarily deliberately associate with each other, yet who find themselves making similar responses to emergent social pressures and threats. A social nonmovement is like a naturally formed (not manmade) cosmic laser or maser consisting of atoms or molecules which come together under natural forces to produce coherent light. In the same way, social nonmovements can have disruptive effects on a social status quo.
Monday, May 13, 2024
Precarity and Artificial Intelligence: What "HAL" Might Do To "Dave's" Future
Note: the title of this post is a nod to an old, rather slow sci-fi movie with a mind-blowing ending that avoided cheesiness while actually being ahead of its time in many ways...
- The use of deep learning and big data paired with social media to guide customers of financial products into decisions and lifestyles which have the least risk of adverse outcomes and the greatest chance of net benefit as calculated by an AI objective function. (See the story "The Golden Elephant.")
- The use of natural language processing and GPT as tools for creating customized virtual "teachers" for children. (See the story "Twin Sparrows.")
- The use of AI tools for the rapid analysis of pathogens and the rapid development of drugs for emerging new diseases, as well as the use of automation in management of epidemics and pandemics. (See the story "Contactless Love.")
- The displacement of skilled manual laborers by AI, and the use of AI to create virtual solutions for this displacement which return some sense of purpose to workers who have lost their jobs. (See the story "The Job Savior.")
- The ways people cope with the likely displacements and disruptions which will be experienced by societies in which having one's basic needs met becomes decoupled from having to work to earn a living. (See the story "Dreaming of Plenitude.")